Context Labs was founded by Dan Harple, an Internet pioneer and technology entrepreneur, having founded and built technologies, companies, and products that have been used by billions of Internet users.

The Context Labs team consists of experts in software platforms, distributed and shared ledgers, encryption, network science, social/local/mobile, big data, and visualization. The team has extensive experience in at-scale innovation, strategy, and building breakthrough platforms and apps.

The team have been responsible for -among others- seminal products for Voice over IP (VoIP) and media streaming (Netscape), standardizing the realtime streaming protocols in the Internet, building the core software platforms for both Oracle Fusion/Collaboration Suite and Weibo -currently enabling realtime communication between 600+ million mobile phones in China-, as well as leading UUNet’s non-USA expansion as the world’s largest commercial Internet backbone service provider.

Innovation Dynamics & Founding Roots

Context Labs and founding team stem from our work at MIT Sloan and the MIT Media Lab focusing on innovation dynamics, commencing with our group co-founding MIT Sloan’s Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab (REAL) in 2012.

The InnovationScope™ platform, a real-time navigator of innovation clusters, enables cities, regions and countries to deeply describe their geographical innovative activities. It granularizes by entrepreneurial and innovation clusters, successes and gaps. The platform helps organizations make informed decisions regarding their strategic investments focused on innovation.

The subsequent technology developed in this effort by our founders, known as InnovationScope™, with its platform for global data interoperability from diverse data sources, proved foundational for Context Labs development efforts for Chainplate Foundation™, Snapshackle Interoperability™, and VUEGraph Analytics™.

Similarly, InnovationScope™ can support and advise multinationals and early-stage investors for strategic and targeted investments regarding certain domains or regions, facilitating a better predictive metric for return-on-investment.

The underlying core of the InnovationScope™ framework is known as Pentahelix™theory, implemented as a big data analytics platform called the Cluster Rank Engine™(CRE) which was developed by the Context Labs team. The framework integrates big data analytics, graph theory algorithms and systems dynamics, to produce insights to influence outcomes in innovation strategy and planning.

In addition, and to encourage interoperability between a multitude of global data resources and devices, Context Labs developed an open data format that generalizes to a wide range of urban data streams, called CityX™.